"...Drama, someone once said, is life with the dull spots removed..."
The portly silhouette. The protruding jowl. That lugubrious, faintly salacious voice. There is no mistaking the profile. Cinema's sovereign of shock, self-styled merchant of the macabre, chubby-handed, nimble-fingered surgeon of the tingling spine: Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, who twenty years after his death still lords undisputed over his terrain of thrills. Imitators, disciples and pretenders have come and gone, directors from Scorsese to de Palma to Lynch have referenced, invoked, and pastiched the Hitchcockian style. But the style itself remains untarnished, still as compelling and engrossing today as fifty years ago, still dividing critics, enthralling audiences and inspiring filmmakers. As Hitchcock's films make the migration to DVD en masse, sumptuously repackaged with new liner notes and the full range of documentaries, extras and even alternative versions, kamera.co.uk wonders why Hitch continues to thrill 50 (and more) years on, and why the man himself, the real Alfred Hitchcock, remains as tangible, fascinating and indecipherable as ever.
Part of the answer lies in Hitchcock's sheer volume of work. Starting out as a title writer in the British movies, Hitchcock cut his directorial teeth in the silent twenties, graduating to talkies in the thirties and on to Hollywood in the forties, fifties and sixties, averaging more than a film a year for fifty years. Shunned by the Academy, never awarded an Oscar as director, Hitchcock was a prolific, avowedly commercial director who retained a peculiarly intimate dialogue with his audience; his name, rather than his stars', was the real box office draw on the poster, each film a new instalment in his popular, populist body of work, a new variation on the Hitchcockian theme. The medium, and the film-going public, came of age with Hitchcock. He was the guide to a Hitchcockian hall of mirrors, a skewed version of our own world in which violent, irrational forces irrupt into the everyday; in which modest people - bankers, secretaries, lawyers, shopkeepers, ordinary Joes and Janes much like the ones sitting in his audience - are engulfed in impossible circumstances and the crack and thunder of strange, uncontrollable forces. In an interview with Picturegoer in 1936, Hitchcock depicted himself as a kind of public servant:
Why do we go to the pictures? To see life reflected on the screen, certainly, but what kind of life? Of course, the kind we don't experience ourselves - or the same life but with a difference; and the difference consists of emotional disturbances which for convenience we call 'thrills'. Our nature is such that we must have these shake-ups or we grow sluggish and jellified; but on the other hand, our civilisation has so screened and sheltered us that it isn't practical to experience sufficient thrills first hand. So we have to experience them artificially, and the screen is the best medium for this.
But Hitchcock was also the gatekeeper to a whole range of cinematic techniques and styles of storytelling - the use of montage and editing as narrative, inherited from Kuleshov and Eisenstein, the symbolism and Gothic mood of German expressionism, of Lang and Murnau, the psychodrama of Freud and Jung, a whole gamut of technical tricks, point-of view shots, track-and-zooms, cross-cutting, use of framing and deep focus - which seamlessly seconded themselves into their audience's cinematic vocabulary. Hitchcock may not have been the first to use these techniques; but his ability to fold them into conventional narratives, to secretly coax his audience down new paths while working within the boundaries of genre, to function both artfully and artlessly, is what makes, as in Shakespeare, for genius.
Style, of course, is the heart of Hitchcock for us today, as acknowledged by the devoted following he commanded among the French New Wavers, notably Godard, Chabrol, and Truffaut. The creative autonomy he exercised was purely a matter of finance and commercial acumen, Hitch would have you believe. The use of what he called "pure cinema", the progression of narrative through purely visual means (editing, image, framing), is simply the most economical and precise way to tell a story in film. The reality, of course, is that he was, as the New Wavers demanded, a true auteur, his images infinitely suggestive and meticulously planned, his techniques experimental and innovative. Hitchcock sourced his stories, collaborated on their writing, meticulously storyboarded every shot before production, frequently directing other people's material which was really all Hitchcock from the outset. For a director bored by the process of filming, the painstaking details of every production are manifest. This is part of our continuing fascination with Hitchcock. Today, the fact that Hitchcock is one of the greatest 20th century filmmakers is a given; deconstruction, interpretation, and dissection of his work forms a core part of modern film semiotics, a set text of every film studies course in the land. His films teem with symbolic detail and technical experiment that positively court narrative and psychoanalytical interpretation: the glorious use of size within frame, of the giant gun-holding hand in Spellbound, the tiny Roger Thornhill against the overbearing UN building or in the vast Nevada desert in North by Northwest; the visual symbols of stuffed birds in Psycho, reflections and refractions in Strangers On a Train, pictures and images in Rear Window; the move from large to local in the opening of Shadow of a Doubt or the ballroom scene of Notorious; the endless Freudian and psychosexual overtones, homo-erotic relationships, overbearing mothers, glacial madonna/whore women, impotent fathers; the obsession with sex, fear, death, murder, perversion, strangulation, mistaken identity; a rich catalogue of mannerisms and methods coursing beneath the simple MacGuffin of his stories. High art masquerading as trash.
The transgressive charge the viewer feels watching Hitchcock subvert the rules of convention - the single-takes of Rope, the fixed viewpoint of Rear Window, the Dali dream sequence of Spellbound, the unresolved ending of The Birds, the languorous kisses of Notorious, the black comedy of The Trouble With Harry - like the directorial touches, carry a quality of both in-joke and admiration, of watching a master conjuror work his spell while simultaneously pushing back the boundaries of technique and acceptability and cocking a snook at the establishment.
But Hitchcock's susceptibility to critical dissection, his contemporary championing as a visionary auteur, ignores the real quality that keeps the films alive - the fact that they do work on a dramatic, generic level; that they are, at the end of the reel, rattling good yarns; that they did fulfil their obligation as hugely successful, commercial box-office draws. Hitchcock's films are high art and trash, with all the manipulations, implausibilities, and inconsistencies of popular cinema. The details of direction are the fascinating flotsam from which the larger ship is built; it is precisely the ability to exist on a multitude of levels, in the real and fictional worlds, as trash and art, as story and allegory, horror and comedy, that keep us coming back to Hitchcock. His films carry the quality of an unanswerable riddle, endlessly posed questions to which there are endless answers. Critical perspectives come and go, but the films outlast them all, resistant to categorisation to the last. And at the centre of the riddle, aren't we really looking for the magician behind the scenes pulling all the strings? The man behind the shadowy silhouette? The real answer we are searching for is to a question posed by Hitchcock himself in an after-dinner speech in 1965:
"Who is this man? Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?"
